Following Palestinian UN bid, Israel okays construction of 3,000 new West Bank units

Israel halts Palestinian tax transfer Israel has halted the transfer of tax and tariff money it collects for the Palestinian Authority (PA) in response to their successful bid for UN non-member observer state status.

Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s finance minister, said on Sunday that the government would use the money it was to transfer to the Palestinians to pay down their debt to the Israel Electric Corporation and other Israeli bodies.

“I have no intention of transferring the taxes due to the Palestinian Authority this month,” Steinitz said.

“They will be used to pay the PA debts to the Israeli electricity company and other bodies.”

Without the transfer, the PA will not have the money to pay government salaries.

Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston, reporting from Ramallah, said 150,000 public service employees rely on the money.

The move is the second such act by Israel. On Friday, it announced it would press ahead with plans to build thousands of settler homes on illegally occupied territory.

Johnston said the new settlements would mean a 25km journey from Bethlehem to Ramallah would be more than quadrupled to 120km as Palestinians would be forced to circumvent the settlements.

US ‘shocked’ by new settlement plan New York Times says Israel gave United States only few hours’ notice of decision to pursue development that could prevent creation of viable, contiguous Palestinian state. ‘This is one of the most sensitive areas of territory,’ says former Ambassador Kurtzer . . . . The Americans were particularly angry at the decision to pursue “preliminary zoning and planning preparations” for a development on the segment connecting the town of Ma’aleh Adumim to Jerusalem (known as area E1) that would separate Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem and could prevent the creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.

For first time, Britain, France may recall ambassadors to protest Israel’s settlement construction

Prelude:

U.S. Scrambles to Avert Palestinian Vote at U.N.

U.S. Campaigns to Avoid Vote on Palestinian Statehood, Report Says

The Vote:

The United Nations General Assembly has voted in favour of upgrading the Palestinians status to that of a non-member observer state.

The vote was taken at a meeting of the body in New York, with 138 countries voting in favour of the upgrade. Nine countries voted against it, and 41 others abstained. (Read more)

Reaction:

Shortly after the vote, the United States Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice said this resolution was “unfortunate and counterproductive.”

“Progress toward a lasting peace cannot be made by pressing a green button,” Rice said.

She also made clear that the resolution “does not establish a Palestinian state.” (Read more)

By Noam Chomsky – 4 Nov 2012

Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force. And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where a million and a half people, in the most densely populated area of the world, are constantly subject to random and often savage terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade, and with the further goal of ensuring that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement that will grant these rights will be nullified.

The intensity of this commitment on the part of the Israeli political leadership has been dramatically illustrated just in the past few days, as they warn that they will “go crazy” if Palestinian rights are given limited recognition at the UN. That is not a new departure. The threat to “go crazy” (“nishtagea”) is deeply rooted, back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related “Samson Complex”: we will bring down the Temple walls if crossed. It was an idle threat then; not today.

The purposeful humiliation is also not new, though it constantly takes new forms. Thirty years ago political leaders, including some of the most noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Begin a shocking and detailed account of how settlers regularly abuse Palestinians in the most depraved manner and with total impunity. The prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote with disgust that the army’s task is not to defend the state, but “to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (“niggers,” “kikes”) living in territories that God promised to us.”

Gazans have been selected for particularly cruel punishment. It is almost miraculous that people can sustain such an existence. How they do so was described thirty years ago in an eloquent memoir by Raja Shehadeh (The Third Way), based on his work as a lawyer engaged in the hopeless task of trying to protect elementary rights within a legal system designed to ensure failure, and his personal experience as a Samid, “a steadfast one,” who watches his home turned into a prison by brutal occupiers and can do nothing but somehow “endure.”

Since Shehadeh wrote, the situation has become much worse. The Oslo agreements, celebrated with much pomp in 1993, determined that Gaza and the West Bank are a single territorial entity. By then the US and Israel had already initiated their program of separating them fully from one another, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish the Araboushim in both territories.

Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: they voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas. (Read more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/16/meir-dagan-mossad-iran-attack-stupid_n_1888840.html

Three young Jewish settlers are suspected of attacking undercover police officers who were posing as Palestinian shepherds. One officer was injured in the incident.

According to police, the suspects punched the officers and attacked them with clubs because they assumed they were Arabs approaching the farm they were staying in. The Mount Sinai farm is located in the south Mount Hebron area. (Read more)

* Noam Chomsky
* Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker
* civil rights icon Angela Davis
* US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation former Steering Committee Member Phyllis Bennis
* Pink Floyd’s lead vocalist and bass player Roger Waters

http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/

n the surreptitiously recorded video, Mr. Romney can be heard asserting that “the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish,” because “the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace” and remain “committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel.” He then cast doubt on the viability of a Palestinian state, given the region’s geography:

Some might say, ‘Well, just let the Palestinians have the West Bank, and have security, and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians. And then come a couple of thorny questions. I don’t have a map here to look at the geography, but the border between Israel and the West Bank is obviously right there, right next to Tel Aviv, which is the financial capital, the industrial capital of Israel, the center of Israel. It’s what? The border would be, maybe seven miles from Tel Aviv to what would be the West Bank. …

The other side of the West Bank, the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point or Jordan. And of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon, what they did in Gaza, which is, the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel. So Israel of course would have to say, ‘That can’t happen. We’ve got to keep the Iranians from bringing weaponry into the West Bank.’

Well, that means that — who? The Israelis are going to patrol the border between Jordan, Syria, and this new Palestinian nation? Well, the Palestinians would say, “No way! We’re an independent country. You can’t, you know, guard our border with other Arab nations.” And now how about the airport? How about flying into this Palestinian nation? Are we going to allow military aircraft to come in and weaponry to come in? And if not, who’s going to keep it from coming in? Well, the Israelis. Well, the Palestinians are going to say, ‘We’re not an independent nation if Israel is able to come in and tell us what can land in our airport.’

These are problems, and they’re very hard to solve, all right? And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, “There’s just no way.”

Rather than search of a solution, Mr. Romney said, “you hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem.” Comparing the open-ended crisis to the co-existence of China and Taiwan, Mr. Romney added: “we have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.” (Read more)

Canada’s largest Protestant church has approved a boycott of products made in Israeli settlements.

Meeting in Ottawa, the governing General Council of the United Church of Canada’s General Council on Friday supported a resolution calling for a boycott of goods produced in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. (Read more)

Hafez Rajabi was marked for life by his encounter with the men of the Israeli army’s Kfir Brigade five years ago this week. Sitting beneath the photograph of his late father, the slightly built 21-year-old in jeans and trainers points to the scar above his right eye where he was hit with the magazine of a soldier’s assault rifle after the patrol came for him at his grandmother’s house before 6am on 28 August 2007.

He lifts his black Boss T-shirt to show another scar running some three inches down his back from the left shoulder when he says he was violently pushed – twice – against a sharp point of the cast-iron balustrade beside the steps leading up to the front door. And all that before he says he was dragged 300m to another house by a unit commander who threatened to kill him if he did not confess to throwing stones at troops, had started to beat him again, and at one point held a gun to his head. “He was so angry,” says Hafez. “I was certain that he was going to kill me.”

This is just one young man’s story, of course. Except that – remarkably – it is corroborated by one of the soldiers who came looking for him that morning. One of 50 testimonies on the military’s treatment of children – published today by the veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence – describes the same episode, if anything more luridly than Hafez does. “We had a commander, never mind his name, who was a bit on the edge,” the soldier, a first sergeant, testifies. “He beat the boy to a pulp, really knocked him around. He said: ‘Just wait, now we’re taking you.’ Showed him all kinds of potholes on the way, asked him: ‘Want to die? Want to die right here?’ and the kid goes: ‘No, no…’ He was taken into a building under construction. The commander took a stick, broke it on him, boom boom. That commander had no mercy. Anyway the kid could no longer stand on his feet and was already crying. He couldn’t take it any more. He cried. The commander shouted: ‘Stand up!’ Tried to make him stand, but from so much beating he just couldn’t. The commander goes: ‘Don’t put on a show,’ and kicks him some more.” (Read more)

In the last 24 hours, two near-fatal attacks were committed against Palestinians, one a suspected terror attack, the other a suspected attempted lynch – both allegedly committed by Israeli Jews. Haaretz was the only website (both Hebrew and English) to put the suspected lynch as a top story, while all the other major news sites lead with Iran’s incitement against Israel.

The first incident, a firebomb thrown on a Palestinian taxi driving north near the settlement of Bat Ayin towards Gush Etzion on Thursday, has yet to be confirmed as a terror attack. All six passengers in the car, members of the Hassan family from Nahalin, were injured – one seriously – reportedly suffering first-degree burns. According to Haaretz, the police said they found another firebomb in the area and were looking into the victims’ claim it was a “Jewish terror attack,” but had not yet ruled out other possibilities.

In another incident late Thursday night, which has already been called a “lynch” by an eyewitness who was there, three Palestinian youth were attacked and severely beaten up by “dozens” of Jewish youth in Zion Square, in the center of West Jerusalem. The woman who witnessed the whole thing posted her testimony and devastated thoughts on her Facebook page, which was partially translated by Haaretz. Here is the full translation:

Its late at night, and I can’t sleep. My eyes are full of tears for a good few hours now and my stomach is turning inside out with the question of the loss of humanity, the image of God in mankind, a loss that I am not willing to accept. But today I saw a lynch with my own eyes, in Zion Square, the center of the city of Jerusalem. I arrived with the staff of “Elem” [NGO that works with children at risk] to Zion Square as we normally do at this hour to volunteer, and barely half an hour went by when I heard screams of ‘A Jew is a good soul and Arab is a son of a bitch,’ shouted loudly and dozens (!!) of youths ran and gathered and started to really beat to death three Arab youths who were walking quietly in the Ben Yehuda street.

When one of the Palestinian youths fell to the floor, the youths continued to hit him in the head, he lost consciousness, his eyes rolled, his head at an angle started to twitch, and then those who were kicking him fled and the rest gathered in a circle around, with some still shouting with hate in their eyes…

When two of our volunteers went into the circle, they tried to perform CPR the mass of youths standing around started to say resentfully that we are resuscitating an Arab, and when they passed near us and saw that the rest of the volunteers were shocked, they asked why we were so in shock, he is an Arab. When we returned to the area after some time had passed, and the site was marked as a murder scene, and police were there with the cousin of the victim who tried to reenact what happened, two youths stood there who did not understand why we wanted to give a bottle of water to the cousin of the victim who was transferred to hospital in critical condition, he is an Arab, and they need don’t need to walk around in the center of the city, and they deserve it, because this way they will finally be afraid.

Children aged 15-18 are killing a child their own age with their own hands. Their own hands. Children who’s hearts were unmoved when they beat to death a boy their age who lay writhing on the floor. The picture has not been struck from my eyes and I can still hear the voices and the feeling of helplessness and the question, what happened to us and what is happening to our kids? And the most important – If and how can we still change it?

After many comments and rumors that the Palestinians had somehow started it or attacked the Jewish youth first, the witness wrote: “I saw with my own eyes that they didn’t attack anyone, and I heard with own ears the teens running just to ‘find an Arab to beat up.’” (Read more)

Due to the recent slew of offensive and racist statements made by Israeli politicians, African diplomats in Israel are afraid to walk down the street, said African ambassadors in Israel during a meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

The meeting, which was attended by the ambassadors of Angola, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast, was recently held in the Foreign Ministry’s offices in Jerusalem, Yedioth Ahronoth reported. (Read more)

Settlers vandalized Palestinian property in the Ramallah village of Sinjil on Wednesday, a local official told Ma’an.

A group of settlers from Givat Ariel outpost wrote “Palestinians should die,” and “Stay away from our lands,” on a wall in the village, Sinjil mayor Ayoub Swaied said. (Read more)

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has ordered the demolition of eight Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills because the territory is needed for Israel Defense Forces training exercises, the state told the High Court of Justice on Sunday. (Read more)